Re: gcc _Decimal types & ecpg

Hi Michael,

Michael Meskes wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 09:22:03PM -0800, Bosco Rama wrote:
>> I was wondering if ecpg from Postgresql 8.3.5 is able to handle the gcc4 _Decimal32,
>> _Decimal64 & _Decimal128 intrinsic data types as transparently as the other types?
>> Or do they just end up getting treated as simple C float/double?
>
> To be honest I haven't heard/thought about these datatypes before. Could you
> give me a pointer where to find more information? Are these types similar to
> our decimal/numeric types?

These are the Decimal Floating Point types with storage bit-widths of 32, 64, 128.
They are part of the IEEE-754 2008 spec and have been added to the C99 spec as an
extension and have been in gcc since early in the 4 series. The GCC docs don't
have much on this:
<http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Decimal-Float.html>

But these guys do: <http://speleotrove.com/decimal>

I don't know how closely it would match your decimal/numeric types internally but
I believe you could specify matching NUMERIC(x,y) declarations for them.

> The parser does not recognize these type keywords. So yes, atm they have to be treated
> as float/double.

I wonder if there will be conversion/cast issues with that? I'll have to look
closer to find out. We may just end us storing them as text/varchar.

Thanks.

Bosco.